The Cancer Innovation Challenge is a project funded by the Scottish Funding Council (SFC) to encourage Innovation Centres in Scotland to work in partnership to help Scotland become a world leading carer for people with cancer.

The project brings together three Innovation Centres, led by The Data Lab in collaboration with the Digital Health and Care Institute (DHI) and Stratified Medicine Scotland (SMS). The Innovation Centres are funded by the SFC to support transformational collaboration between universities and businesses. The Centres aim to enhance innovation and entrepreneurship across Scotland’s key economic sectors to create jobs and grow the economy.

The Challenge has two major work streams:

1.  An open innovation funding call to identify innovative cancer data science solutions

2. An open innovation funding call to develop new tools for cancer patient reported outcomes and experience measures

There will be a programme of activities surrounding each work stream involving industry, the public and a variety of stakeholders in the wider health sector. The aim is to utilise NHS data to support the delivery of more effective and efficient cancer care to help derive new analytical insights into Scottish cancer data, inspire local start-ups to join in the effort, demonstrate ability to produce large scale NHS data for complex analysis under safe and secure conditions and to support informed discussion about the creation and use of synthetic data.